Russell Hoban obituary

Russell Hoban in 2005. The language used in Riddley Walker is a deeply ingenious and poetic representation of what English might actually sound like in the sci-fi world he created. Photograph: Graham Jepson/WriterPictures

For many years it seemed there was more than one Russell Hoban. Now that he has died, aged 86, after 60 years of intense activity in his successive careers, it may begin to be possible to gain some sense of the whole man. Certainly, it is clear enough that the young author of dozens of children's stories, whose masterpiece was probably The Mouse and His Child (1967), explored the same territory as the later author who published nearly 20 adult novels, and whose masterpiece was probably Riddley Walker (1980). Each is a tale of glorious escape from physical and psychic bondage. Each ends with a sense that freedom is itself deeply bounded.

Hoban was born in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, studied at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts), and served in the US army infantry, between 1943 and 1945, earning a Bronze Star during the campaign in Italy. He married Lillian Aberman in 1944 and worked as a commercial illustrator, storyboard artist and television art director from the late 1940s until 1957, and for the next decade as a freelance illustrator for various New York advertising agencies, as well as several magazines in the Time-Life empire.

From the evidence of the two early non-fiction texts for children that he did illustrate, he was exceedingly competent but somewhat impersonal. He never illustrated any of his own fiction. That task was left to his wife, whose deft impressionist drawings, not unlike the work of Edward Ardizzone, illuminated 25 of his children's tales.

It was not until 1959 that Hoban began to publish his first books for young readers, but he began as he would continue. Even the earliest of them, such as Herman the Loser (1961) or the Frances books, which began in 1960 with Bedtime for Frances, were hard-edged, swift, rich in image, far-reaching in their implications, and in the sense they gave that life was bigger than could be told.

The climax was The Mouse and His Child, a full-length novel that may be the most resonant and haunting book for children published in the past half century. It is a tale to be read when grown. A clockwork mouse, for sale in a toyshop, holds hands with his child. When his mainspring is wound, he spins and bounds into a dance that ends only when he runs down. He lifts his child above the table as he turns, but sets him down again. This is family. This is life. But it is also a fable of escape: having been sold and broken, the mice find that – because of the damage that living has cost them – they can now move in ellipses towards the mythical dolls' house that spells freedom, of a sort. Christmas comes. We do not know how long they will survive into the new year.

None of Hoban's works for children since 1967 quite equal the oneiric intensity of this novel which marked the peak of his early career and initiated a personally traumatic drama of bondage and ambivalent relief. By 1969 he, Lillian and their three daughters and a son were in London, where he lived until his death. Within a year or so he had left her and later became estranged from their children. He met his second wife, Gundula Ahl, whom he married in 1975 and with whom he had three sons. And he wrote the first of his adult novels, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz (1973), a fabulation that once again engages a father and son, bound together in a quest for the secret behind the turning of the world.

After two further books, he published Riddley Walker, the work that established his extremely high reputation as a deeply original novelist. It is an enormously eloquent and demanding science-fiction tale set in the UK perhaps three millennia after a nuclear war has ended civilisation. The survivors inhabit what is often referred to by science-fiction critics as a "ruined earth", a ravaged, resource-poor, constantly threatened world whose inhabitants are unlikely to be literate, or long-lived.

It is a difficult world to portray, except sentimentally, or in terms of Grand Guignol. Hoban solves this problem by having his young protagonist tell his story, in his own words. The astonishment is in the words, a deeply ingenious and poetic representation of what English might actually sound like in such a world. The first sentence of the book has become famous: "On my naming day when I come 12 I to gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long before him nor I aint looking to see none agen." By the end of this novel the attentive reader dreams in that tongue.

Nothing quite matched Riddley Walker in the final 30 years of Hoban's career, but new novels came so fast – eight of them in his last decade alone – that they may not have been properly assimilated. Later tales such as My Tango With Barbara Strozzi (2008), may seem casual, with their exorbitant explorations of sex and the London Underground and the demi-mondaine of Fulham. But they are not. At their most intense moments, they can be understood as a ferocious old man's mythopoeic indictment of the last years of the western experiment in civilisation. At their less intense, they are fun.

Much the same could be said of Hoban in person. He was a short, compact man with a clear cold eye and a sometimes forgiving smile. He drank quite a bit, but there was never an embarrassment of self-exposure that acquaintances might marvel at. He was intensely sharp and seemed, as well, to be in control of his body, despite an array of illnesses. He enjoyed picnicking on Hampstead Heath, but one felt, seeing him gaze at the view across London, that what he saw was the end of the world.

He is survived by Gundula and his children.

Patrick Ness writes: Four years ago, my publishers sent Russell Hoban – at my bashful suggestion – a copy of my book The Knife of Never Letting Go, inspired as it was by my fierce admiration for Riddley Walker, to see if he might provide a quote for the cover. Usually you get no reply, but one Sunday evening, I received a call at home from Hoban himself, apologising very politely that he wouldn't have time to read it, but wishing me luck anyway. He was an amazing writer, a kind man and an inspiration.

• Russell Conwell Hoban, writer, born 4 February 1925; died 13 December 2011